Muriel Wilson's Bamboo

DRAFT Muriel Wilson’s Bamboo Chris Stapleton Introduction About the only thing everyone agrees upon about this bamboo is that it is one of the most attractive hardy bamboos ever brought into cultivation, with arching culms and cascades of pea-green foliage. Everything else – which genus, which species, how to spell the species name, exactly where it came from, whether it was flowering, who really named it, and how long its flowering cycle is, could be argued about at length. It is not possible to come up with answers to all these questions, but it is possible to look at what facts there are, to sort out the facts from the assumptions, and to see what further work is required. Most people are probably familiar with the history of this bamboo but to recap, I will give the story so far. The collection of Muriel’s bamboo Muriel’s bamboo was collected in Hupeh province of China, almost certainly as a cutting, in May 1907. The famous British plant collector Ernest H. Wilson, who brought us so many of our garden plants, was on his third plant collecting expedition in China, this time working for the Arnold Arboretum, which required scientific herbarium collections as well as live plants. He had been persuaded to leave Kew in December 1906 on this 2½ year trip against the wishes of his wife Nellie, who had delivered a baby girl, Muriel Primrose, at their house in Gloucester Road, Kew, in the spring. No doubt they were on his mind the following May when Wilson was in western Hupeh. He was on a six week round-trip from the port of Yichang on the Yangtze River, which took him to the borders of Hupeh with Sichuan and Shaanxi Provinces. It was probably near Muriel’s first birthday when he found a beautiful bamboo, and he must have been homesick as it was an extremely hard trip. The countryside was poverty-stricken and food was almost unobtainable (Briggs, 1993), despite the botanical wealth all around him. In this area he discovered for the west the Kiwi fruit, Actinidia deliciosa, and he collected seed of the Handkerchief Tree, Davidia involucrata. He had competed with a French missionary, Père Farges, to introduce this tree to the west, and this rivalry was to continue even after his death, with respect to the bamboo he had just collected. Rhizomes of the bamboo were shipped back to the Arnold Arboretum, and one plant was sent to Kew in 1913. It was named here as Arundinaria murielae by George Sykes Gamble of the Indian Forest Service (1920), with a description of the plants growing at Kew, but citing Wilson’s herbarium collection made in China as the type. E. H. Wilson specifically asked for it to be named after his daughter, Muriel. Cultural notes were added by Kew horticulturalist W. J. Bean. The flowers could not be described as it was not to start flowering at Kew until 1988, 81 years after it had been collected. The taxonomic treatment of Muriel’s bamboo Fifteen years before the collection of Muriel’s bamboo, the French missionary Père Farges had made a dried collection of a bamboo in flower, not in Hupeh Province, but in neighbouring Sichuan. Because of its distinctive one-sided racemes enclosed in spathes, it was described as a new genus, Fargesia, by the French taxonomist Franchet (1893) . The species name given was spathacea. Plants from Sichuan were almost certainly not brought back for cultivation. Fargesia was recognised as a valid genus by many authorities, including E.G. Camus (1913) and Nakai (1925), but nothing was known about the bamboos in this genus except for 1 DRAFT the dried collection made by Farges. One of the few people who have not recognized Fargesia was Gamble. He put all bamboos with spathed flowers into a section of Arundinaria (1896) . In this way he was not recognizing either Fargesia or Thamnocalamus, the latter being a genus described by the Indian Army officer General Sir William Munro, for Himalayan bamboos with spathed panicles, rather than the spathed unilateral racemes of Fargesia . When Nakai in Japan received from Kew a cutting of the now much-travelled Arundinaria murielae, as well as Arundinaria nitida, he realised that these so-called Chinese Arundinarias were not Arundinaria at all, as they had more branches. He decided, possibly rather tongue in cheek, to give them a new genus of their own, Sinarundinaria, in 1935, with a very sketchy description based upon the young plants he had received. He assumed that they had monopodial rhizomes, possibly because Gamble had put them in Arundinaria, rather than Thamnocalamus or Fargesia . It should be remembered that Nakai himself recognized the genus Fargesia, and he may have not realized that Gamble considered Thamnocalamus to be a synonym of Arundinaria. The cat was put among the pigeons when Muriel’s bamboo started to flower in Europe in the 1970s. The flowers were unilateral racemes enclosed in spathes, very similar to those of Fargesia spathacea. To some bamboo taxonomists, this was no problem, and the new combinations Fargesia nitida and Fargesia murielae were duly made. Sinarundinaria was soon listed as a synonym of Fargesia, (Keng, 1983). In the USA however, different developments ensued. Thomas Soderstrom of the Smithsonian Institution received in early 1979 some flowers of Muriel’s bamboo from a Danish bamboo grown in Germany by Max Riedelsheimer, and, excited by this discovery, he quickly wrote an article in the American horticultural magazine Garden (Soderstrom, 1979a), in which he made some rather far-reaching decisions. These were uncharacteristic of his normal painstaking approach. It may well be that he did not think he was making serious taxonomic decisions at the time, as he was writing in a popular magazine, and he did state in his article that we would have to await the flowering of Arundinaria nitida to know the exact relationships of all these bamboos. However, he stated that the flowers of Muriel’s bamboo had ‘all the characteristics’ of the genus Thamnocalamus , and also that they ‘matched’ the flowers of two other species, Arundinaria sparsiflora and Fargesia spathacea, with which he considered Muriel’s bamboo to be synonymous . He also gave the wrong year of collection: 1910 instead of 1907. In this way, he was deciding to sink the genus Fargesia into Thamnocalamus, and also, simultaneously, to sink Muriel’s bamboo into spathacea, the first of these species to have been named. No doubt Wilson would have turned in his grave at the bamboo named after his daughter being considered just the same as one collected by his rival plant collector Père Farges. Anyway Soderstrom followed up on his decisions by validly publishing the new combination, Thamnocalamus spathaceus, in a more appropriate scientific journal (Soderstrom, 1979b), and attempted to sink the name murielae for ever. However, in neither the article nor the formal publication did he justify his decisions in any detail. When a genus or species is relegated to synonymy, or for that matter, a new taxon is named, the soundness of the taxonomic decision can usually be judged by whether or not it is thoroughly argued. A satisfactory treatment usually considers the characteristics of several related genera or species and includes a key or a table of characteristics. It also includes a list of the collections examined, so that others can judge whether sufficient material was available for a decision to be made. As Soejatmi Dransfield has pointed out (1992), the transfer of species to another genus or their inclusion in synonymy without the provision of extensive justification merely adds to the confusion so prevalent in bamboo taxonomy. As Soderstrom’s papers did not justify his decisions, it is surprising that his fairly radical treatment was given so much credence. As it was, he had changed his mind within a few years, and had himself 2 DRAFT formally given recognition to Fargesia as well as Thamnocalamus by 1986 (at the International Grass Symposium, Soderstrom & Ellis, 1988). Soderstrom’s treatment of Muriel’s bamboo was picked up by all those who were undertaking reviews of the bamboos at the time (Clayton & Renvoize, 1986; Chao & Renvoize, 1989), although it was generally made clear that such treatments were rather tentative. There had been no in-depth revisions of the bamboos concerned for so long, and much of the new Chinese literature was rather brief and confused many taxonomists. Any justifications for taxonomic decisions were in Chinese, with the briefest of summaries in English, although good Latin descriptions were often given. Essentially, in the absence of any better straws to cling to, Soderstrom’s decisions were followed by many other taxonomists. Soderstrom himself approved of many new Chinese genera, and together with McClure had prepared a new genus, Adinocalamus , which would have consisted of the species now placed in Drepanostachyum and Himalayacalamus, if Keng had not beaten them by the publication of his new genera. It is highly unfortunate that he started to become ill in 1981, as his illness and untimely death left a great vacuum in bamboo taxonomy. Fortunately this is now being filled by a growing cadre of Chinese taxonomists, who are much more familiar with the living plants than any western taxonomist can ever hope to be. Thus we saw the apparent demise of the names Fargesia and murielae , but like the man said, reports of their death were greatly exaggerated, and while the Thamnocalamus spathaceus labels went up in western botanic gardens around the world, in horticultural circles and in many Chinese institutions the name Fargesia murielae became ever more widely used.

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